Stephen Colbert Takes On Gun Lobbyists In First ‘Late Show’ After Texas Church Massacre

Opening his first Late Show after Sunday’s mass shooting in Texas, Stephen Colbert never mentioned the NRA by name, but condemned the “truly evil people out there who want you to feel powerless, just for a buck.”

“Because if you feel powerless enough, you know what might make your feel more powerful? Buying a gun.”

Reminding viewers it was just 35 days since 59 people were killed and hundreds wounded in the largest mass shooting in modern American history, in Las Vegas, Colbert noted Congress has yet to pass a restriction on bump stocks, used by that gunman to increase the efficiency of his semi-automatic rifle.

“No one’s talking about that,” he scolded.

On Sunday, a gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle and an apparent grudge against his mother-in-law stormed the church she sometimes attended, slaughtering 26 people, about half of them children – triggering another round of talk about unfettered access to guns being the price of liberty in this country.

“Five thousand years ago, if your village had a tiger coming into it every day and was eating people, you wouldn’t do nothing. You would move the village, or build a fence, or you would kill the tiger,” Colbert said. “You wouldn’t say, ‘I guess someone’s going to get eaten every day because the price of liberty is tigers’.”

He urged viewers to vote in 2018, “for someone who will do something. “Because this is an act of evil, and the only thing necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”